Joint Venture Lightning

I recently started a local networking and mastermind group for folks interested in internet marketing and e-commerce.

We meet on the fourth Wednesday of each month from 7:00 - 8:00 pm in and around the Roanoke valley.  Our January meeting was a hit. The topic of discussion was my favorite subject…”Harnessing the Power of Web Video.”

I explained how you can use a simple video with some proper keyword usage in the title, tags and description to get your content on page one of Google and grab tons of free organic traffic. I also covered a few free resources for syndicating your web video and using these tools for totally dominating your niche. There were plenty of great questions from those who attended and we tried to answer them all. Most stayed well past the one hour time to network and get answers to even more great questions.

Here’s a short video of comments from the attendees of the January meeting.

Internet Marketing Professionals January Meeting Testimonials from JointVentureLightning on Vimeo.

The next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, February 25th from 7:00 to 8:00 pm at the Cave Spring Library on 419. We’ll be meeting in the small meeting room back in the children section of the library.

Full-time internet marketer and SEO / Pay Per Click consultant Zach Thompson will be leading the discussion on “How To Set-up A Website. You can see the full details online and you can join the group at: http://ibd.meetup.com/841/

Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Uniq and others are great tools for fundraisers looking for new ways to raise money for their cause.

The key is to use these tools properly.

Think of a social networking site like this… imagine a global night club or dinner party where celebrities, authors, poets, artists, models, rock stars, and political leaders and industry experts are all standing around chatting about everything imaginable. Now imagine that this seemingly exclusive gathering is open to the public and has no cover charge to get in.

Everyday folks like us can simply sign in, look around, find somebody interesting to listen to and then join in the conversation. That’s also a fair description of microblogging sites like Twitter.

Now imagine how you would feel if some stranger just barged in on your conversation and tried to sell you something. That’s how most people try to use these types of sites… by barging in and selling without offering value and interest first.

Here’s an example of how to do it properly: I was interested in communicating with a particular donor prospect but I didn’t know quite how to introduce myself in-person. It felt like I would be “barging in” uninvited. So I found this person on Facebook and saw that they were a member of a local civic group that I used to belong to. This gave me the opportunity to comment in a relevant and interesting way with this prospect.

The result was that he “friended” my Facebook profile and we have since been  able to communicate with each other in a friendly and mutually beneficial way. The point is to establish rapport and warm up a cold prospect before you go for the appointment and the funding request.

Here’s another example: I love using LinkedIn because they have an Answers forum where you can post answers to members questions. This allows me to establish myself as a credible expert in a variety of subjects. I’m offering value first. People who benefit from my answers can give me a “Best Answer” designation and a recommendation that all builds my credibility.

People who read my answers can then contact me for other related questions and to further build rapport. Maintain these online relationships with care and you can convert them into donors over time.

In a previous post I described how I used web video syndication to get my son’s science project video in the first four positions on Google.

I went back a few days later and played with social bookmarking on sites like Digg, Furl, StumbleUpon and others. These bookmarks did two things for me. First, they drove traffic to my son’s video. Second, they gave the video two more postions on page one of Google.

That means that the video controlled postions 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8 on page one of Google in just two days! Imagine what that can do for a business marketing their products online.

The traffic from organic search results goes up. The credibility of the expert goes up. Conversion goes up. Profits go up.
So, you can boost all of your efforts with web video by including social bookmarking as part of your overall strategy. TubeMogul lets you do this for free quite easily but if you want AWESOME power for totally dominating your niche then I recommend TrafficGeyser.com.